The Conversation

Can he be the global warming culprit? LinkCould our meat-loving Western diets push climate change over the edge? That was the message of a recent report from UK think tank Chatham House that, even if the world moves away from fossil fuels, growth in meat and dairy consumption could still take global warming beyond the safe threshold of 2C.

Credit: L. Sabetelli / Wellcome, CC BYThe Black Death struck Europe in 1347, killing 30-50% of the European population in six violent years. It wasn’t a one-off epidemic: it signaled the start of the second plague pandemic in Europe that lasted for hundreds of years and only slowly disappeared from the continent after the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666.

Do you care where the food you buy comes from? amy, CC BY-NCThe public reaction to the Hepatitis A scare linked to contaminated frozen berries imported from China continues.

Health marketing materials used to promote measles vaccine during the 1960s. CDCThe news on the current measles outbreak contains plenty of reminders that measles causes brain damage, pneumonia, hearing loss and death. A few lone voices have spoken up to say measles isn’t that serious, including an Arizona doctor who said it’s “really just a fever and a rash” – and soon found himself under investigation by his state’s medical board.

In American Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is the 'sheepdog' – someone who operates in a state of constant, anxious alertness against inevitable attack. Entertainment Weekly

The connections between technology, urban trading, and international economics which have come to define modern living are nothing new. Back in the first millennium AD, the Vikings were expert at exploring these very issues.

Governments and taxpayers deserve to know that their money is being spent on something worthwhile to society. Individuals and groups who are making the greatest contribution to science and to the community deserve to be recognized. For these reasons, all research has to be assessed. Judging the importance of research is often done by looking at the number of citations a piece of research receives after it has been published.

There are many good reasons for increasing gender diversity on boards: better decisions, better performance, and better representation of the consumer base.But the idea, put forward in a variety of research over the past twenty years or so, that women on boards improve the moral and ethical decision-making of those boards has a number of problems for both women and men, in the boardroom and out of it.

Now with added "2". ShutterstockHypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP, is a key component of the world wide web. It is the communications layer through which web browsers request web pages from web servers and with which web servers respond with the contents of the page. Like much of the Internet it’s been around for decades, but a recent announcement reveals that HTTP/2, the first major update in 15 years, is about to arrive.

One day something will outgrow the blue whale – but it won't be another whale. EPAWhen life on Earth began around 3.6 billion years ago, all organisms were small. Indeed, it took some 2.5 billion years to evolve any organism that grows larger than a single cell.Since then, things have accelerated a bit and – along with the great diversification of body forms – animals have tended to get bigger. Indeed, the largest animal ever to live, the blue whale, is still very much with us, and has been swimming the world’s oceans for only a couple of million years – a mere blink of the eye in the long, long history of life in the sea.